A4: An Introduction to WAI-ARIA

We are all striving to enhance and enrich the user experience and interfaces of our websites and applications, whether it be by using AJAX to enhance responsiveness, pulling in content from third-party services or feeds, or developing custom widgets.

More often than not we need to use JavaScript to do these things - hence the recent explosion in the popularity of JavaScript libraries (think YUI, jQuery, Prototype, etc.) - but many such techniques have not always been accessible by users of assistive technologies.

WAI-ARIA, a new standard from W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative, addresses these challenges by defining "a way to make Web content and Web applications more accessible to people with disabilities".